


Melt the Stars

by NotQuiteHumanAnymore



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men Evolution
Genre: (sort of), Demonic Possession, F/F, Gen, M/M, Witchcraft, Wrongful Imprisonment, horrible medical practices, seriously some of those therapists need to be fired, terrible psychiatric advice, whose bright idea was it to put Wanda in a box
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-18 20:49:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 20,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20319304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotQuiteHumanAnymore/pseuds/NotQuiteHumanAnymore
Summary: There is someone else in Wanda's mind, and no one believes her. Unfortunately, it's when someone does start to believe her that everything goes wrong.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ilya_Boltagon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilya_Boltagon/gifts).

> This was written for Ilya_Boltagon, based upon our pet au. Hope you enjoy!

Many stories begin with the triplicate. A triplicate meaning “being a set of three,” can refer to anything from books to deities. In a specific, unnamed but disturbingly popular religion, this refers to the triplicate of the father, the son, and the ghost. However, in this case, we are referring to a far older and therefore more powerful triplicate. This, of course, is referring to that of the maiden, the mother, and the crone. Unfortunately, in this specific instance, the triplicate has been broken. Shattered, if you will, by a quaternary interloper. 

The crone, an older but not necessarily old woman who fits the archetype in wisdom only, steps off of a train, steadfast in her determination to assess the danger caused by the interloper. As of yet, she does not know how terrible things have become. Not yet irredeemable, but teetering--the fate of the world as it is known lays in the trembling hands of a powerful young girl, and she may lose her balance.

Agatha Harkness is in New York to save her, or decide if she is too far gone to be saved. 

Three cars down, another woman steps off of the train. She is, for the sake of the metaphor, both mother and ghost. She is not supposed to be here. Agatha is meant to be her eyes and ears, meant to report back with her success or failure in time. However, she is a mother separated from her children for far too long. Her heart bleeds with the force of missing them. The name on her ticket reads “Lena,” and if she has her way, Agatha will never get the chance to decide if her daughter is beyond saving. 

Agatha knows when she is being watched. She has not survived this long with magic in the very marrow of her bones to be unaware of when there are eyes on her. Unfortunately for her, the train platform is crowded, and the feeling fades as the people sweep along past her in a torrential wave. For a brief moment, she believes she recognizes a head of long brown hair, but it turns out to be just a teenager, her ponytail swishing behind her as she races to catch up with a group of friends. Agatha allows herself to be satisfied. She has made it clear to Magda that proximity to the Beast is what will increase his power. The knowledge and belief in his existence would only make him stronger. It is enough of a risk for Agatha to be here, for both of them to come to this place would be folly, would mean their ruin. Surely Magda would not risk such a thing. 

Nevertheless, as she makes her way to a payphone outside of the train station--One of the few that still remain in function now that the world is again moving on--she cannot help but feel uneasy. Agatha dials a number from memory and waits for the call to go through. As the phone rings for longer, Agatha finds her unease giving way to irritation. If she does not pick up, she had best at least have her answerphone in place, else Agatha will have to make a house call far too early for her liking. Eventually, there is a click, and a voice that is familiar in tone if not necessarily in cadence, as the woman on the other end has never really known what her own vocal cords feel like, answers. 

“Hello,” Raven says, unquestioning. Agatha is certain that only three people alive have this phone number, and last she heard, Irene was not speaking to Raven at present. Agatha does not know what happened to them, nor does she care. Her main concern at present is how Raven managed to find the girl, how Raven managed to break her free, and whether or not Raven is keeping everyone else safe around her. 

“I am in New York,” Agatha said without preamble. “Bring the girl to me tomorrow and I will assess the state of her capabilities.” Agatha hesitates for only a moment before deciding that Raven neither knows nor needs to know the full scope of the situation. 

“Very well,” Raven replies, and suddenly her voice is strained. “I will have her meet you at the park near Bayview High.” There is a roaring noise in the background of the phone call and Raven has to raise her voice to be heard. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to stop her from destroying the  _ entire _ house.”

The line goes dead. Agatha can’t help but feel that the dial tone ringing in her ears is a bad sign. A very bad sign. There is a very specific place in the world for superstition and intuition, and Agatha Harkness just happens to exist within it daily, and she knows when a bad sign is a Very Bad Sign indeed.


	2. Chapter One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus begins me fucking with the timeline. I'm not sorry.

Wanda wasn't afraid of the dark. She would never let anyone think that she might be, not even when the shadows began to coalesce into a silhouette in the corner, when ice began to drip down her spine and she could taste the metallic tinge of the air that she remembered of her cage. In the dark there was no real way to remind herself that she was out of that box and back in the open world. 

But despite all of that, she would never say she was afraid of the dark, because none of that was the frightening part.

What frightened Wanda came after the silhouette had formed in the corner of the room. Eventually, the silhouette would open its eyes. Twin points of red-hot flame would burn in the suggestion of a hooded face. That was what Wanda was afraid of. When the silhouette looked at her she felt herself grow weak and the next day she would wake up with less of herself than when she had started.

Not that she'd ever admit to that, either. The last time she'd told someone about the figure of shadows, about losing herself, she had ended up locked in a box, secluded from the world. She was neither in control of her mind nor her abilities, they had said. She was a danger to everyone. So now she kept it to herself. 

After all, what no one else knew couldn't hurt her. 

Wanda felt shaky. She didn’t remember how she had gotten home, but her body ached down to her bones. She was in bed. She had probably been asleep at some point, but as her eyelids dragged open she felt a lurch of pure exhaustion radiate through her body. 

She sat up in her bed and shivered as her hair brushed along her neck. It didn’t hurt, didn’t have any reason to hurt, but something in her screamed at the contact.

Before she could process the feeling and try to decide what in the heavens was wrong in a logical sense, the way the doctors had taught her to, she was on her feet. She stumbled, exhausted and half blind to the bathroom. 

The only bruises she could see on her skin in the dirty mirror were the ones under her eyes. And yet her skin felt as though a billion microscopic needles had been placed in every pore, and every time she was touched by her hair, her clothes, the weave of the carpet, the needles moved, burned. Pain and panic welled up inside of her. A quiet, rational part of her brain told her that she was just exhausted. She needed to take a few deep breaths because she knew what this was, it was just a panic attack left over from the overwhelming emotions that had been battering her for the past few weeks. 

That part of her was resolutely drowned out by the part of her that was terrified, that knew she wasn’t wholly in control right now and wanted so desperately to be in control. She didn’t want to be Mystique’s puppet, no matter how badly she wanted revenge. She didn’t want to go back  _ there _ , no matter how much her rational mind told her that the doctors were able to help her, at least before they’d gotten the idea to stick her in a box. This was the part of her that had lashed out at Pietro when she had first seen him. This was the part of her that feared everyone she came into contact with. 

She didn’t really remember leaving the bathroom and finding the scissors, but she had a dim recollection of Todd wolf-whistling at the sight of her in her borrowed pajamas. She didn’t think she’d sent a hex bolt at him, but she could smell the sting of magic and ozone on her palms as she glanced down at her hands. Maybe she had. Maybe she hadn’t and this was just her powers reacting to her fear. 

To her racing thoughts, the solution was clear. She couldn’t be hurt by her hair if it wasn’t there. 

The initial cut was choppy and stopped just above her chin. She didn’t hate it, but she was still shaking and knew that she didn’t have the control to try and make it any better right now, so instead, she kept going. Lock after lock of hair fell to the counter, onto the floor, into the sink. Wanda hadn’t realized how much hair she had until it was gone. Her head felt light and free, and for a brief moment, she felt better, felt in control of herself. No one had told her to do this. She raised a hand to her head and felt the fine, choppy cut with her fingers. It could do with being cleaned up a bit, but she couldn’t make herself care. The fear had subsided as she worked, and she felt like she could breathe again. There were no pins or needles under her skin. She was in control.

But, of course, that was when her brother showed up. She couldn’t stop herself from being angry with him, and her anger always seemed to be so much stronger than the rest of her emotions. The quiet part of herself that remembered the therapy that had helped her with her fear of the dark wanted so badly to accept him as her family again. She knew how bad it was for her to be alone, but the rest of her was too angry to listen. He would not believe her, her anger said. He would not help her. He would send her back  _ there _ , to be trapped in a metal cage until her powers killed her, or the doctors did. 

She was so angry. She was so scared. She was so  _ tired _ . 

She let her anger drive her, speak for her. She pushed past him and was satisfied at the way his face fell, even as part of her wanted to start crying. 

Let him be upset, her anger said. Maybe then he would understand a fraction of what she was dealing with. 

Raven enrolled her in school. It was, unfortunately the same school her brother went to and she wasn’t totally sure if she could ever stop being angry at him, but she couldn’t remember the last time she had been so excited about something. 

She got to be normal, for the first time in years, no one thought she was dangerous. No one thought she was going to go nuclear if she so much as shed a tear. It was an exhilarating feeling. It was odd, at first. As angry as she was at Pietro and as wary as she was of the others, they were the only points of familiarity in the world of high school. She recognized a few faces from fighting the X-Men at the shopping mall, but she didn’t dare go to them. It didn’t take her long to realize that she was hopelessly unprepared for school, and worse, for making friends. She was used to being feared, used to being used, but she felt oddly unmoored in this new environment. It was enough that when Pietro and his friends reached out to her, she let them. 

But then, of course, there was Tabitha. Tabitha didn’t seem interested at all in being friends with her brother or the others, but she stuck by Wanda for reasons that Wanda couldn't understand. 

She didn’t understand a lot, though, so she figured it was just another thing that had managed to pass her by while she was busy learning how to get out of straitjackets. 

Tabitha had her sandals off, on the table beside her in homeroom and was painting her toenails when she offered Wanda her first taste of friendship. 

Wanda hadn’t meant to stare at the bright bubblegum pink color that Tabitha was using, but it was hard not to. There was only so much reading she could do with Tabitha’s music blaring through her headphones, and she found it oddly soothing to watch Tabitha paint her nails so expertly. 

“Want me to do yours?” Tabitha asked her. Wanda looked up, feeling a bit like a deer in headlights. 

“Um,” she began, not sure how to respond. It would be one thing if she could figure out if this was a joke or a legitimate offer, but she never seemed to be able to tell with Tabitha. She’d learned the others tells by now, knew when they were being earnest, but Tabitha was a bit more mercurial. 

“Don’t worry,” Tabitha said, capping the polish and reaching down to her bag, “I’ve got other colors.” She grinned up at Wanda, watching for the moment Wanda realized that her bag had no books or papers in it whatsoever, but was instead apparently a miniature salon. She had no less than twelve colors of nail polish, which she laid out on the table in a row for Wanda to choose from. Wanda also saw what appeared to be makeup, aluminum foil, mentos, and a collection of jewel CD cases. 

Slowly, not sure if this was really happening, Wanda held out her hands for Tabitha to inspect. Her nails were bitten to the quick and her cuticles had been picked raw, but Tabitha didn’t blink at the sight of them, just picked up a shade of dark purple that looked almost black unless it was hit by the right light and began to paint Wanda’s nails with the same swift, sure strokes of the brush. They got a few irritated looks from their homeroom teacher, but Tabitha paid him no mind, so Wanda didn’t either. 

“So,” Tabitha began, after a few moments where she had apparently needed to focus intensely on Wanda’s nails, “how do you like it here so far?”

“School, you mean? Or the house?”

“Both, I guess,”

“It’s weird living around other people again. No one was ever loud.... Where I was before. I haven’t decided if it’s a good thing or a bad thing yet.” Tabitha flashed a grin at her.

“Let me know if we’re ever being too loud, okay? I’ve got ways of keeping those boys in line.” 

“What about you?” Wanda asked, as she realized that she didn’t know what had brought Tabitha to Bayville, to the Brotherhood. 

“My dad’s a con artist,” Tabitha said, the picture of nonchalance. She popped her gum and motioned for Wanda’s other hand. Wanda’s fingers felt oddly delicate with the polish on them. “The X-Men recruited me first, actually. I just didn’t really fit in with them, so I crashed the boy’s club.”

Wanda thought of the glimpses that she’d caught of that big, magnificent house. She couldn’t imagine living there in a million years.

“What was that like?”

“Bo-ring,” Tabitha sang, “They were nice and all, but there’s such a thing as being  _ too _ nice. Nothing I could do would ever be good enough for them, y’know?” Wanda considered her tenuous position in the world and nodded.

“Yeah,” she said, thinking of the house she’d grown up in, the feeling of constantly being behind everyone else in the Brotherhood, shunted off to the side. “I think I do.” Tabitha paused, glancing up from Wanda’s fingers to look her in the eye. Wanda didn’t know what she saw, but she worried that she’d done something wrong, and Tabitha would brush her off. 

“The kids are cool, though.” Tabitha continued, as though she hadn’t stared straight into Wanda’s soul. “You don’t know ‘em well enough yet, but even if they’re all goody-goodies, they still manage to be good people,” Tabitha paused, “well, ‘cept for Scott, maybe. I think he’s just a geek.” she leaned in, gesturing with the nail polish brush, “Between you and me, Jean could do miles better.” Wanda thought hard, trying to match the names to blurry faces in her memory. After a moment, she remembered sharp green eyes and a trail of flame-red hair. Something in Wanda fluttered at the memory, of the adrenaline glowing on Jean’s face, the way her jaw had been set in concentration as she threw debris at them with her mind. 

“I oughta introduce you,” the words broke Wanda from her memories. “You’ve been staying in Rogue’s room, now that she’s shacked up with the good guys, you know.”

“I didn’t realize--” Wanda trailed off, not sure how to finish that sentence. She hadn’t realized that Rogue had lived there. She hadn’t realized the line between them all was so thin. To her it sounded almost like Tabitha had crossed sides for the sole purpose of having more fun. What were the other kids reasons? What was hers?

She thought of Xavier’s pity, his calculated visits to her, and the stone cold look on his face every time the orderlies dragged her away.

She’d never be able to live near a man like that, even if he would let her. 

Tabitha laughed, her earrings glittering as she shook her head at Wanda’s expression. 

“Don’t worry, she won’t come back to us, that’s your spot now. We’d just have to make one of the guys sleep on the couch.”

Wanda had never been more glad that someone wasn’t a telepath. If she couldn't even explain her conflicting emotions to herself, how could she hope to find help from anyone else?

“Now!” Tabitha said, relinquishing her fingers and shoving the bottle of nail polish back into her bag. “Don’t touch anything for like, twenty minutes at  _ least _ or you’re going to get goopy polish everywhere.”

“The price we pay for fashion,” Wanda lamented, quoting something she’d overheard in the hallway. She didn’t quite understand how to be a person in this context, but she could pretend. And that, at least, she could do quite well.


	3. Chapter Two

Jean couldn't explain the feeling that she got when she was around Wanda Maximoff. Or, rather, it was difficult for her to pick apart the swirling vortex of emotions that were there. There was the automatic fear and distrust, that came with her being a member of the Brotherhood and Magneto's daughter to boot. But then, there was a part of Jean that recognized her on a primal level. She was curious, she wanted to know more about her, so much more about her. And, well, if Jean had come all the way to stand beside Tabitha looking lost and awkward, then she certainly wouldn't want to be ignored.   
Rationally, sure, Jean was aware that Wanda was already talking to Rogue, but Jean had walked into the room and Wanda had looked at her in a way that made Jean worry. Maybe Wanda didn't like her. Maybe Wanda was afraid of her. And if nothing else, Jean was not used to being disliked. At least not by people that she hadn't chosen to dislike first.   
So, when Wanda had met her eyes and gotten that hooded, conflicted look on her face, Jean forced down her confusion, put on her friendliest smile (the one that had even managed to win Rogue over) and walked over to the duo in the corner.   
When she finally gets close enough to really look Wanda over, Jean takes her time. Wanda seems to be sizing Jean up in a similar way, though hers is clouded with far more trepidation. The feeling is maddening and Jean is almost discouraged enough to stop, turn tail and hide, but then... there it is again. The feeling of being lost and scared in a room full of people that would sooner use you than understand you. It's practically echoing off of Wanda into the chambers of Jean's soul, and Jean can't stop herself from going to her. The feeling is one that Jean is intimately familiar with. The Professor may have taken her in, but she was a telepath too, and sometimes even the great Charles Xavier slipped up and let his thoughts bleed through his psychic walls.   
She knew he'd done something to her mind, she could sense it sometimes, him slipping through her psychic fortifications to check on something that she couldn't quite touch. He was afraid. Whether he was afraid for her or of her she couldn't be certain, but at this point it was one and the same.   
Rogue was looking at her with a bemused expression, and a spike of ice cold fear warped down Jean's spine as she wondered whether or not she'd just projected her thoughts to the entire manor, but a quick check of her shields reassured her. Jean turned back to Wanda, who was surveying her with steel in her warm brown eyes.   
"Hi," Jean said, a trifle too enthusiastically. "I don't think we've been formally introduced. I'm--"  
"The Phoenix." Wanda's thoughts cut her off, an inner voice so unlike Wanda that it took Jean a moment to place it. The voice was garbled, almost seething with a rage that Jean couldn't hope to understand. Jean had never heard that name before. Her code name with the X-Men had always been Marvel Girl, but something about the name rings inside of her, in that same echo chamber that Wanda's emotions keep touching.   
Jean stumbled over the rest of her words, because Wanda didn't say that aloud, and so Jean can't very well politely comment on it.   
"--Jean Grey, it's, um, really nice to meet you."  
She stuck her hand out for Wanda to shake at the tail end of her colossal fail of an introduction. Her smile started to falter even as she spoke. Wanda's eyes didn't give an inch in their steely mistrust, but despite that, when Jean stretched her hand out, Wanda reached out as well. She reached for Jean's hand hesitantly, as if expecting Jean to snatch it back and laugh at her. No, not as if expecting, she clearly was expecting that, the image of her own face twisted in a pitying grin was projected from the depths of Wanda's subconscious. A swoop of sorrow fell through Jean. Who must have hurt Wanda and how badly must it have cut her for this to be her reaction at meeting anyone new?  
Jean toned down her manic smile, aiming for something softer, more genuine.   
"Wanda," Wanda croaked, and it took Jean a moment to realize that she was introducing herself, as if Jean wouldn't know who she was. "Maximoff." She continued, in the same clipped, unsure tone. "I think we're in English together now." Wanda's eyes finally gave, flicking away from Jean's face.  
"Oh?" Jean said, surprised.   
"Yeah, they just moved me," A wry smile stretched across Wanda's lips. "Again."  
"Well then, I look forward to learning with you."  
"Yeah," Wanda said, sounding surprised to mean it, "Me too."  
Jean ducked away after that, leaving the conversation to return to whatever she had interrupted, feeling her ears burn but the rest of her warm in a decidedly different manner. She carried the conversation with her for the remainder of the day, and was unsurprised when she dreamed that night, it began with Wanda, smiling at her for real.  
Of course, that meant it was only a matter of time before the dream shifted and became surreal. Wanda's smile had barely faded from her dreamscape when she was struck by the sensation of falling. The vertigo was striking, but clearly not bad enough to wake her from the dream. When the fall ended and she touched down on a plane of black glass that glittered with the reflection of the stars above, she wasn't alone.   
At first, she just noticed her reflection, moving a fraction of a second too late as she roamed the glass pane. Then, as if emboldened by her noticing, her reflection began to move in the opposite direction of her. Fear gripped her heart, primal, shouting at her that this shouldn't be happening, that something was wrong, that her reflection is meant to do one thing: reflect, not think for itself.  
Her reflection pushes up through the glass, shards gathered around her arm like asteroids caught in the gravitational pull of a star.   
As her reflection laboriously pulled herself up through the glass, Jean was suddenly struck with the perverse desire to run over and help. This was weird enough without her assisting though, so she stayed put.   
The glass doesn't heal itself when her reflection is finally standing on the edge of the hole that she had created. Unlike Jean, she was now dressed in a collection of glass shards. They catch and reflect the sight of the stars above, giving off the illusion that she is ringed in flames.  
Her hair, though, is no illusion. It moves like the fire it is, embers trailing off behind her to skitter across the glass and become new stars in the reflection.   
Jean saw her own face in that of her reflection, but she couldn't recognize it. She tried, she knew, logically, that it was hers, but it was so strange to see it like this that she couldn't quite make it click in her mind.   
"Hello Jean," she said, and no matter what else might look the same, Jean knew herself and that was not her voice. Jean swallowed, suddenly terrified, her throat dry enough to catch on itself.   
"Hey," Jean replied reflexively. Not-Jean sat cross-legged on the ground and Jean followed suit. "Who are you?" Not-Jean shook her head.  
"You're a smart girl, Jean," Not-Jean replied, "You know what I am. If you think about it hard enough, I'm sure that you'll even be able to figure out what has shaken me loose."  
Phoenix, a garbled, terrified, disgusted voice repeated in her mind. When Jean followed the memory, she found that the voice was attached to Wanda's subconscious.  
"You're here about Wanda, right?"   
"Oh my dear," The Phoenix sighed, "I do wish it were that simple."  
The glass below them, aside from the portion that the Phoenix had broken through grew opaque, and then the light from the stars began to dance on the surface. And then they began to tell a story.


	4. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time for Chthon to make his horrible entrance.

He had spent too long too long too  _ long _ pulling on the strings of his young vessel's mind, molding her to become the perfect puppet when the time came, for it to all come crashing down because of an upstart like  _ Phoenix _ .

Chthon had been lucky, he could see that now. Trapped dormant underneath the volcanic beds that made up Mount Wundagore's base, his essence had been able to spread naturally with time, pulling on the threads of his captivity until he'd been able to find a vessel and snatch her from her parents.

Unfortunately, that one had died. It turns out that small ones were not meant for the sort of possession that Chthon required. They were too weak, too small. No one had ever found the Small One's body, because by the time the possession failed, there had been nothing left of her save a skull missing one front tooth, bleached white and scorched on the inside, as though her very brain had caught fire and melted her from the inside out. Which, Chthon well knew, it had. 

More failed vessels and bones had joined that First, as he grew his strength and his patience. None had been truly worthy. All of them had burned. 

The humans got wind of the evil that permeated the mountain, and if they only knew how deep it went, they would never stop being terrified. It made finding replacement vessels more and more and more difficult as time went on. The humans moved away, steered clear, did not even venture close enough to mine the ore and gemstones that Chthon so delicately cultivated as temptation. Curses, it seemed, were pervasive and persuasive, both. 

But then, a light in the dark. A small family seeking shelter. The woman was giving birth even as her husband flew overhead. The storm threatened them all, and Chthon was hungry. 

_ The caves, the caves, the caves, _ he sang out to them, worsening the storm around the mountain. He could do far worse, but he wanted freedom, and humans were fragile, he'd learned the hard way. He could not possess one that was broken, bloody, dead. 

He was not sure which of the two he had managed to persuade, but another moment and there they were, setting foot in the caves system, in the heart of Chthon's captivity. They're so weak and small that he could sing. His eagerness at the possibility of freedom, of a vessel almost overtakes him, but he can sense power, not in either of the humans in his cave, though the man is undoubtedly more powerful than he remembers humans being, but on the horizon. He can taste it like the blood in the air, and so, for the first time in centuries, Chthon willingly lies in wait, patient. 

When the first child is born, Chthon falters, initially wonders if he was mistaken. The boy is frail. He doesn't move. He doesn't cry. Chthon dismisses him without a thought, disgusted, and begins to overtake the mother. Clearly she is the reason he can sense this power, this strength. 

But her screaming resumes. This time for longer. This time, the birth is bloodier, to the point where Chthon almost believes that the woman is going to die there. He briefly considers attempting to take over her body since it would seem she is doomed anyway, but then it ends. 

Chthon has never once been stunned by silence in the wealth of his existence, and yet it was stunning, then. Even the white noise of the storm above them all could not overcome it. Neither child cried.

Until the boy hiccuped, and the girl opened her eyes. 

In unison, the Maximoff twins began to scream. 

The birth was almost as good as a blood ritual. Chthon can feel power thrumming through him, and patience, he thinks, is a virtue even for beings like himself. The moment that the girl begins to scream, Chthon can sense that she will be his vessel. She will be strong enough.

And it is with the newfound virtue of his patience that rather than possess her now, he reaches out through the blood and the pain in the air and Marks her.

Her mind had grown increasingly open to him, even with distance. And when she had been forced into solitude by those she trusted, Chthon had been there, prepared, and with her anger and her pain, he had taken over.

But now, there was the  _ Phoenix _ . A being of the universe, like him, trapped in a mortal vessel, like him, but he would not fool himself into believing she would ever be his ally. She had always had too much love for the smaller creatures. Humans, mutants, animals all of them. 

He had recognized her on sight, smothered though she was by the child within which she resided. And if he had been able to recognize her essence, small and shriveled and uncared for, then he had no doubt that she had been able to recognize him, no matter how far away his full power lay trapped. His bond was getting stronger with Wanda every moment of every day and it was only a matter of time before he would be able to lure her home again and come into his full power. The Phoenix jeopardized this entire plan with her mere existence. He had stopped sensing her energy around the same time as the Feron debacle and had truly thought that was that. 

His luck may have run out with the arrival of the Phoenix, but his willpower had not. She would not stop him from completing his ascension, and the world would crumble beneath his feet.


	5. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bask in the temporary normalcy. Just teens being shenanigans

Jean was smiling at Wanda in a way that she wasn’t entirely sure she trusted. There was something about Jean that unsettled her, deep in her bones. Something that made the deepest recesses of her mind roil and shy away, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. If she hadn’t been so irritatingly lonely, she probably would have turned down Rogue’s request to stay the night. However, despite the deep-seated discomfort that sprang up in Wanda every time she saw Jean, there was another part of her that felt drawn toward her. Somehow, she felt safe around Jean, more herself around Jean, and no matter how she tried, she couldn’t reconcile the two feelings. 

“Why don’t you sit down?” Jean asked, her voice was soft and the smile didn’t leave her face, even though a small furrow appeared between her eyebrows.

_ Run, _ growled an instinct in the deepest corners of her mind,  _ fight, kill, win _ .

Wanda, used to the intrusive thoughts, didn’t even grimace at the thought of killing her friends, or the girls who were  _ trying _ to become her friends.

Rogue finished lighting the candles around them and sat beside Kitty, leaving only a space between her and Jean. Resigned to her fate, Wanda took that spot and resolutely ignored the way Jean’s smile softened and her shoulders seemed to relax. 

“Rogue, where did you even get this?” Kitty was asking.

“Risty knows a guy who knows a girl who can see into the future,” Rogue returned, sounding smug. “Apparently this one is the real deal.”

Rogue finished unraveling the canvas ouija board and produced from her pocket an ornately carved wooden planchette. Something in Wanda perked up at the sight of one of the carvings. She was certain that she had seen it before, but she didn’t know where. 

“Hands in, everyone,” Rogue said, and Wanda obediently placed her fingertips on the planchette, shivering when her hand touched Jean’s. She chanced a glance over at Jean, to see if she was experiencing the same duality of emotion that Wanda seemed to be plagued by, but she was looking at Rogue indulgently.

“Who are we trying to summon?” Jean asked, a teasing note in her voice. Wanda realized that Jean didn’t believe in this, in any of it. Somehow that made her feel safer. She looked up and met Tabitha’s eyes across the board. Tabitha was smirking at her and as Wanda watched Tabitha gave her an over-exaggerated wink. Wanda scowled.

Whatever mischief Tabitha was planning, Wanda was sure she wanted no part of it.

“Anyone,” Rogue shrugged, “The Professor says no one has died here, but I don’t think I believe that. This is an old house, surely  _ someone  _ has.”

“Go on then,” Kitty said, elbowing Rogue. Unlike Jean or Tabs, Kitty looked  _ distinctly _ spooked. 

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Wanda asked, genuinely curious.

“I believe in hauntings. I’ve seen them,” Wanda was tempted to ask what she meant, but there was pain in her voice, a loss that spoke to Wanda, and she wondered if she already knew. She let it go.

“Uh,” Rogue began, “let there be no evil forces or demons,” She said, sweeping the planchette over to the ‘g’ on the board. Wanda tried to swallow the feeling of amusement at Rogue’s request. Everyone else followed the movement. “Is anybody there?”

_ Yes, _ said a voice in Wanda’s ear.

The planchette moved to “yes.”

Wanda blinked and blinked again. As she stared down at where her fingers were holding the planchette, directly over the symbol that she recognized, shadows appeared to be creeping up and over her skin. No matter how hard she blinked, they didn’t go away. 

“Um,” She said, well aware that her voice was trembling. 

Jean was the one who noticed.

“I think we should stop,” She told Rogue, “How do we–” before she could finish, the shadows clamped down onto Wanda’s hand. She cried out, because it  _ hurt _ . The shadows were cold and felt as though they were sinking deeper and deeper into her flesh. She’d never experienced frostbite before, but she couldn’t help but wonder if this was what it felt like. The planchette rocketed toward “no.”

The candles guttered and all but the white one between Jean and Kitty extinguished. Wanda was falling, her vision tunneling as the shadows swept over her. Her ears rang. She could vaguely hear Jean saying  _ something _ , but when she tried to look over at Jean to see what it was, she cried out, scuttling back away from Jean. 

Jean was on fire. It was in her hair, in her eyes, in the worried hand that reached for Wanda. She knew, in that deep instinctual place in her mind, that that fire would burn her until there was nothing left. 

She wasn’t sure if it was the fear, the shadows, or just the last candle going out, but everything went dark.

Relieved, she sank into the cool shadows and the escape they provided.

When she woke again, the room was in disarray, there was wax in Tabitha’s hair, and Wanda’s spine  _ ached _ in the way it usually only did after someone put her in the straitjacket wrong.

Jean was leaning over her, clearly worried, but Wanda was relieved to see that she was no longer on fire. She let Jean help her sit up and grimaced as her head began to pound.

“So,” Kitty said, her eyes wide, “This place is, like, definitely haunted.”

Jean was the first to laugh, and one by one they followed her lead. If it was a joke, they were safe, but Wanda had a sinking feeling that there was a lot more to it than that.

\--

Wanda wasn’t hiding, she refused to call it that. She had just... stepped away for a moment. She knew that she was just having a difficult time adjusting to being in school, surrounded by other people her age was... well it was basically unlike anything she’d experienced before.    
There were so many people around, all the time. Always talking and laughing and making jokes that she knew she ought to understand but maybe never would. So while she wasn’t  _ hiding _ per se, she absolutely was taking a break from the swarm of people that were constantly around. 

She was tucked away in the back corner of the library, away from all of the windows and reading tables and she had plopped herself down on the rolling step stool with a sigh of relief at the overwhelming  _ quiet _ that surrounded her. 

Her bag lay beside her, ignored, and she took a moment to revel in the silence. She twisted around on her perch to survey the books on the shelves around her. She saw a few familiar titles, ones she recognized from the small, under-funded library she’d been allowed into at the asylum. She had pored over those books for hours on end, memorizing every word of her favorite ones so that when she had a bad day and was trapped in the box, she could recite them to herself to feel a little less alone. 

Well, as alone as she could be when the darkness was staring at her and trying to whisper portents of doom in her ears. 

She reached out and brushed her fingers along the spines of a few titles she didn’t recognize. Curious, she tugged one off of the shelf and read the cover flap summary. She wrinkled her nose and put it back. She tried again, and the second book sounded far more promising. She settled back against the shelves, rooted around in her bag for a chocolate bar she’d grabbed from the outside vending machine, and tried to get lost in the words until she had to return to being a normal student.

She was lost in the plot of the novel she’d picked up when she realized she wasn’t alone. By this time she’d ended up sprawled out on the ground, the rolling stool somehow more uncomfortable than the wiry carpet. She glanced up, scooting out of the way, and found herself looking up at Jean, who was surveying Wanda with a small smile on her face.

“I was wondering where you’d gone off to,” Jean said, her voice teasing. Wanda’s brow furrowed. She hadn’t thought she’d been doing anything wrong by hanging back from her class. They  _ had _ been told to look for something to do a report on. Wanda was just getting a headstart. 

“Is class over?” She asked.

“No,” Jean said, “I just don’t have any other friends in this class.”   
“I find that hard to believe.” A bashful smile crossed Jean’s face at her words.

“Do you mind if I join you?” She asked. Wanda considered it. On the one hand, she had no idea how to hold a conversation. On the other hand having Jean to herself like this was warming her to her bones, and she quite liked the feeling of it. She smiled and moved over, leaving a space for Jean to sit beside her. 

“Oh that’s cool!” Jean said as she sat down and Wanda finished moving her bag. “I didn’t know you had a tattoo,” Wanda furrowed her brows in confusion, before realizing what it was that Jean had probably seen.

“Oh, that’s not a tattoo, it’s a birthmark. Weird, isn’t it?” Jean smiled at her, and Wanda’s shyness seemed to evaporate in the face of Jean’s smile.

“I never would have guessed, it looks really neat.”

“Thanks,” Wanda said, not sure what else to say. No one had ever commented on her birthmark before. Maybe it was because her hair was short now, and people could see it, but she definitely never would have considered it something “cool” or “neat.”

“So what were you reading?” Jean asked, and Wanda, grateful for a subject she knew how to navigate, launched into an explanation far more thorough than Jean probably wanted.


	6. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This whole fic has, at this point, been infected by Chaos pure and simple, and I heartily enjoyed it.

Agatha thinks that she knows how to cut her losses. She has been in this business for longer than anyone would care to think about, and has been forced to make many difficult decisions before today. The problem, she thinks, with this one, is how long she spent with Magda. Agatha may be a hardened old broad, but even she isn't immune to the sway of sentiment, and Magda's daughter is her spitting image. She nearly slips up now and again and is, for the first time, grateful for her age. She can brush off any slips of the tongue as her eyes going, or her mind failing her at last. But as she takes further stock of Wanda's abilities and her subsequent  _ inability _ to control them, her heart is breaking. She almost wishes that she were an ailing old woman through and through, because Wanda Maximoff is an unholy terror of inexperience and heightened emotion, and Agtha knows in her old bones what she has to do. From the moment she sees Wanda's eyes and the anger there, the coiled energy waiting to spring forward and burn those who have hurt her, Agatha knows. 

She goes along with the charade anyway, her heart breaking with every further confirmation that Wanda is very much not in control. How can she return to Magda and report that her daughter is dead? How can she report that Agatha did not just  _ fail _ but gave up on Wanda entirely? 

"Walk with me, girl," She says, when she is not satisfied but  _ certain _ . 

Wanda, the bits of her left, gets up calmly to follow her. She is not a telepath, she does not suspect a thing. 

Pietro leaned down, over the shoulder of the woman huddled behind a tree, and said, "Boo."

Predictably, the woman startled. The book fluttered from her hands as she stumbled to catch herself, and Pietro grinned. He darted around her and plucked the book from the grass. 

The grin faltered as he caught sight of the notes and spiraling handwriting. He looked from the woman, back to where he could still sort of see Wanda and the old lady, and then back to the woman.

She was in her mid forties, if Pietro had to guess. Her dark hair was going a bit grey at the edges, and there were worry lines around her mouth and eyes that he was sure would speak volumes if he ever bothered to listen. 

"What, are you a witch?" Pietro asked. The woman's eyes darted between him and Wanda as if she didn't know where to look. Pietro rolled his eyes and stopped giving her an option. He stepped in front of her to block her view of Wanda and crouched down so he was at her eye level, as she still hadn't bothered to stand back up. 

Her face crumpled, a mixture of hunger and agony in her eyes as she looked at him. 

"No, I am not a witch," she said. She sounded like she had an accent, but Pietro couldn't place it, not that he much cared. 

"You sure?" He asked, brandishing the book, just out of reach. "Cause this doesn't look much like geometry."

"It is not mine,"

"Yeah, sure, you're just holding it for a friend, right?"

The woman tried to peer around him, but was unsuccessful both in how she was still huddled up by the tree, and how thoroughly he was blocking her view. Well, that and the fact that she kept looking back at him every half second, as if he would disappear if she looked away too long. 

"Yes. For a friend," she confirmed, sounding distracted as she continued, "I can't even read it. The pages are all either blank or in a language I can't recognize."

Pietro looked down at the leather-bound notebook with ink splotched circles and madman's handwriting. It sure looked like English to him. Then again, he knew plenty of people who could read English but couldn't speak it, so he supposed that the opposite should be true as well. 

"Look, just tell me why you're following my sister, and I'll leave you to your weirdness," he offered, because as fun as antagonizing people was, it got frustrating quick when people stopped paying attention. 

"I am not following anyone,"

"Bullshit," Pietro snorted. Her voice alone had been hesitant to tell the lie, but he wouldn't have believed her even if she was the Picasso of misdirection. "You've been following her for a good couple of weeks now, and we might not be best buds or anything, but she's my sister and I'm not going to let some witch up and disappear her or whatever it is you do."

The woman, as if finally seeing that he really wasn't going to go anywhere without an explanation, turned and gave him her full attention. It didn't make things much better that she had that half-pained, half-awed expression still on her face. 

"Oh, I'd hoped to do this so much differently. Years ago or years from now, when you were safe again." She sighed and reached for Pietro. In his shock, he didn't think to stop her until her hand was on his cheek.

"Uh, okay, this is starting to get freaky, even for us," he began, already looking for the others so he could plan his escape route and let them know about the creepy witch lady on the way. He was sure that Todd would want to know someone was threatening Wanda. If Pietro couldn't protect his sister without getting accosted by ladies with spellbooks, he'd just have to be a mediary and let the others do the front-line work while he got Wanda to wherever definitely  _ wasn't _ here. 

"Pietro," she continued, as if she had no idea he was about to duck under her arm and flee, "I'm your mother."

Pietro faltered mid quickstep and wobbled. His eyes snapped back to the woman and searched her face for any sign of another lie.

He crossed his arms over his chest, still holding the book, and stepped back so that her hand fell away. He tried to go for 'suave' or even 'nonchalant' as he backed up, but his plastered smile was shaky and his posture was definitely closer to 'defensive,' than anything else. 

"I got it," he said, feigning realization and hating the way his voice shook, "you're our mom, you're alive, and you finally come back to just follow Wanda around. What, do you think the old lady is going to kill her or something? Come on, a three year old wouldn't believe this."

"I know this is a lot to understand, but there are forces at play here," his mother,  _ his mother _ , began. She was calm, her hazel eyes pinned him in place, and if she had started any other way, Pietro thought he might have actually tried to listen. As it was, he could feel his hackles rise.

"Nope," he said, venom dripping from his words.

"I... what?"

"No, I don't want to hear your reasoning. If you are my mother, and I'm still not convinced, I don't want to know what shitty bullshit reason you had for leaving us with  _ him _ ." he snarled, "I don't care why you decided to come back now, but you have no idea what I do or don't understand. Forces or no forces, I haven't believed in anything since my father dropped me off in New York  _ alone _ and left me to build a supervillain base on the moon. You're not dead? Great, but next time just send a postcard." He snarled.

He left, not wanting to hear another word that might come out of her mouth. She might have been his mother or she might have been a lying snake, but that didn't change the fact that the back of his throat was burning. He was still carrying the book, he realized. He considered, for a moment, trying to throw it all of the way back to where his mother stood, looking confused. But fuck it, he wanted to inconvenience her. 

He needed to find Wanda. 

No sooner did he decide to look for her than the park appeared to spontaneously combust somewhere to his left.

The power of the blast knocked him off of his feet, and his mouth tasted like blood, dirt, and the peculiar static that came from Wanda's magic.

"I'll take "wildly overpowered sister" for five hundred, Alex," he growled, picking himself up. The world seemed to be echoing slightly, and it took him a minute to realize that it was because of all of the people screaming. 

It didn't look like anyone was hurt, not really, but an explosion is enough to scare the pants off of more than a few people, and it was practically a stampede to get away from the park, now. 

Pietro was never one for moving with crowds, though. Instead, he ran toward the explosion site, growing more and more nervous as he got closer and only saw  _ one _ person lying prone. And he was pretty sure  _ he _ was the twin with the white hair, not Wanda. 

"Shit," He said as he looked down at the unconscious (not dead, she was very clearly breathing, thank fuck) woman on the ground. 

"Shit," he repeated, looking for his sister and seeing  _ fuck all _ . 

He turned back the way he had come and raced to somewhere in the middle of the crowd that was now turning back to see the aftermath of Wanda's concussive blast. A few trees had fallen and the lamps probably wouldn't come on tonight, but thanks to the beauty of magic there were no clear signs of anyone being hurt (well, except the old lady), and nothing to suggest what had happened.

"Man," He said, loud enough for the people around him to hear. He tucked the spellbook in at his side and adopted a look of wide eyed surprise. "That was a freak lightning storm, huh? No clouds or anything."

People could rationalize anything. Sometimes he really envied normal humans, he thought, as the lie started to catch on and spread, people entirely fabricating memories of a bolt of lightning hitting the ground. Someone else came up with the idea that it was a meteor hitting earth, and before Pietro could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious backwards, everyone had their own pet theory, and none of them involved a mutant girl who couldn't completely control her powers. 

Someone else started talking about God, and Pietro took that as his cue to leave. He needed to talk to Wanda. He caught sight of their mother looking frantic and ducked further into the crowd before she could see him. 

Well, he needed to  _ find  _ her first. 

He tried the Brotherhood house first, only to find it emptier than it had ever been. 

He knew, logically, that when mutants went nuclear that sometimes the government got involved, but he hoped against hope that this time Xavier and his nosiness had gotten there first. 

He blew past the defense systems they had in place (pausing just long enough, of course, to shove a piece of gum chewed for this exact moment into the barrel of one of the robotic stun guns. Just because he needed their help didn't mean he had to be nice about it.) and right through the front door ahead of a couple of kids he hadn't met before. 

He stopped in the foyer. It didn't matter how many times he came into this place, it was still impressive enough to give him pause. It didn't quite take his breath away anymore, and it's a good thing, too, because the next thing he did was take a deep breath and call out for his sister. 

"Wanda?" He yelled, "Wanda Maximoff to the foyer please, Wanda Maximoff to the foyer." 

A few passing mutants stopped to stare at him in confusion, and he was glad none of them seemed to recognize him, seeing as he wasn't exactly the most welcome face around these parts. 

A point that became abundantly clear when a hand landed on his shoulder and spun him bodily around. 

He did his best to maintain his composure as he came closer to Wolverine's glare than he'd ever wanted to.

"She ain't here, slim," Wolverine growled, "go on home before you make someone's ears bleed."

Pietro felt his eye twitch, but before he could speak up and say something impossibly stupid, Wolverine spun him around and shoved him back toward the door.

"Alright, alright," he muttered, waving a dismissive hand behind him. "I can take a hint." 

He could take a hint, of course, but that didn't mean he had to oblige it. 

As soon as Wolverine had grunted his satisfaction and turned away, Pietro sped off in the opposite direction, doing his best to control his tailwind so as not to give himself away. 

She  _ had _ to be here, because if she wasn't, he had no idea where she might possibly be, and that prospect was far more terrifying than being stopped by the Wolverine. 

He dashed through the hallway, around a corner, and stopped only when he ran into another living being. The distinct scent of fading sulfur and coconut shampoo alerted him to who it was that he'd just been found by. 

Kurt narrowed his eyes as he seemed to register what was happening and reached out to grab at Pietro's arm.

"What are you doing here?" He hissed. Pietro, counting his lucky stars that Kurt had not immediately dragged him off into his freaky hell dimension and dropped him at Xavier's feet, had to bite his tongue against a sarcastic reply.

"Looking for my sister. I think she's in trouble and she's not anywhere else." Kurt stared at him for another moment before he relaxed ever so slightly with a resigned sigh. 

"We can check with the girls," Kurt replied, and when Pietro made to object at being followed around like an errant child, Kurt fixed him with a look of disbelief that was all the more unnerving given his lack of pupils. "I'm not going to let you roam around this place on your own. I might be trusting, but I'm not stupid."

Pietro didn't really have anything to say to that. So he just shrugged and motioned for Kurt to lead the way. 

Kurt led Pietro up the back set of stairs that had probably once been part of a servants entrance. Pietro couldn't help but be glad that Kurt had gotten the unspoken message that he desperately didn't want to be seen. He was equally glad that Kurt hadn't tried to teleport with him. Sure it would have been expedient, but it took him ages to get the smell of sulfur and ash out of his clothes. By an unspoken agreement, he didn't grab Kurt and race them up the stairs, either. Instead they just walked in step and in silence. 

When they got to the top of the stairs, Kurt saw fit to speak again.

"Wanda's been hanging around with Jean and Rogue lately, if she came here, she'd probably be with one of them," he said, already stepping out ahead of Pietro. 

They knocked at Jean's door, despite the fact that she was a telepath, and if she'd been inside, she would have undoubtedly opened the door before Pietro even had a chance to raise his hand to knock. 

"I'm not sure if Rogue is home," Kurt continued after they had peeked inside to confirm that, no, Jean was not hidden in her room. "But she shares with Kitty, who definitely is, so we might be able to find out where Rogue is and see if Wanda's with her."

"Smart," Pietro said absently. There was something he was forgetting, he knew it had to do with Kitty in a roundabout sense, but it wasn't until Kurt was reaching for the door that Pietro remembered.

He dragged Kurt down the hall, back toward the stairs, and he could  _ feel _ his ears going pink, but he refused to acknowledge it. 

"I'll handle this one," he said, aiming for a cheerful tone. "you just stand there and look pretty."

" _ Was _ ," Kurt began, but Pietro was already down the hall and at the door again. 

He slapped a hand over his eyes and opened the door without preamble.

"Hey," he began, and gave them a second.There was shriek, the sound of someone hitting the floor, and then something, he was pretty sure it was a throw pillow, smacked into his face.

"Get  _ out _ !" Kitty yelled.

"Stop screaming, it's me--" 

"Dude what the fuck," Lance chimed in, sounding embarrassed and furious.

"I literally can't see anything, calm your shit. Do you know where Rogue is?"

" _ No!" _ they cried, simultaneously.

"Thanks," he replied, kicked the pillow back through the door, and shut it behind him.

Kurt was still standing, shell-shocked at the end of the hallway, and if Pietro didn't know any better, he would say that Kurt was almost as embarrassed as he was. 

"On the one hand," Pietro said, aiming for nonchalance, as he made his way back over to Kurt, "I'm worried about Wanda, but on the other hand thank God she wasn't in there."

" _ Why? _ " Seemed to be the only thing Kurt was able to ask. 

"Eh, you were about to open the door anyway," Pietro said, "better me than you."

"We could have just  _ not _ opened the door." Kurt continued, still sounding traumatized. Pietro grinned at him.

"Where's the fun in that?"

"The fun is in  _ not _ embarrassing my friends?"

"You weren't even going to knock, I saved you from an eyeful you definitely didn't want. You're welcome." Kurt ducked his head, grumbling, and Pietro knew that he'd won that round. 

The sound of a wheel squeaking toward them brought Pietro back to the present moment and the fact that he certainly was not supposed to be in this house. He would have been fine with being caught, had he not then heard a snippet of conversation filter down the hall. 

"--Promise you, my dear, they're not here."

"Please, Mr. Xavier," Pietro's mother began, but she was cut off by a chillingly familiar voice.

"Magdalena, if the man says they're not here, they are not here," Magneto said, and if Pietro thought he'd heard his father at his angriest before, he was dead wrong. Ice sank down Pietro's spine and he froze. "I've had just about enough of your fairy tales, how many times do we have to tell you that Wanda is a danger because of her mental instability, not because some demon possessed her when she was born?" he snarled. The voices were getting closer. Pietro swore, a few colorful words in English, and a few more in Yiddish for good measure. He gripped Kurt by the arm, swung them back inside of Jean's empty room, crowded them between the wall and the dresser, and slammed a hand over Kurt's mouth before he could protest.

"Think. Loudly. Now." Pietro ordered, his words clipped with fear. Kurt's eyes were wide, but he went completely still against Pietro, his gaze flickering to the door and back frantically. For his part, Pietro did his best to calm his racing thoughts. If his mother was worried enough about Wanda to get their  _ father _ involved, then this was worse than he'd thought possible. He couldn't risk the Professor sensing his thoughts and ratting him out to his father, especially not given their communal track record with Wanda. 

There was a creaking noise to their left and both boys turned to see the window opening from the outside. 

Jean was halfway through the window before she spotted them. 

Pietro, who had still been holding the  _ fucking _ spell book with one hand, reached up and put a finger over his lips. 

Jean's brow furrowed, her eyes flickered between them, and then they shot to the door. Her eyebrows hit her hairline and she twisted the rest of the way inside, held up a hand toward them, and had the window closed before the knock sounded on her door.

"Jean, dear, do you have a moment?" Xavier called through the door. Jean plastered a smile on her face and opened the door with a wave of her already outstretched hand.

"Hello Professor," She chirped, "what can I do for you?"

Sneaking in through the window wasn't strictly necessary, but sometimes it felt good to be able to use her powers for something that wasn't violent or for the good of something someone else had told her to believe in. Sometimes it just felt nice to fly, and that was what she had been doing before chaos erupted at the Xavier Manor. Flying, thinking, and talking to the part of herself hollowed away behind a wall that felt as though it had been shoved in by someone else, not by her. 

_ He is going to take over,  _ the Phoenix had told her.  _ He is already stronger than she is. There is almost nothing left of her, and unless we find away to bind him again, he will break free, and all of humanity will die.  _

"How can I save her?" Had been Jean's response, and she felt the way that the Phoenix would have shaken her head and considered her a silly girl for thinking such a thing. 

_ She's long past saving. _

"No," Jean had replied. Just no. She knew Wanda in a way the Phoenix didn't. The evil entity attempting to use her to awaken the darkest forces of the universe was not the same one who had brought her chocolate in the library and giggled over classical novels with her. Wanda was the one who had defended her opinions of literature with her.  _ Wanda _ was the one who cared about whether or not Tabitha was going to get in trouble over the fact that she never did any of her schoolwork. Wanda was the one who had quietly confided in her that her irrational fear was the cold and that her second biggest fear was that she would never understand how to be a real human being again. 

She didn't know where Wanda had been or what she had been forced to go through, but Wanda was in there. She wasn't just a husk for some evil being to walk around in. 

She had shut down the tenuous line of communication, then, and allowed herself to drift back down in the direction of the Manor... only to find that it might as well be on fire with how much mental screaming people seemed to be doing. 

Kitty and Lance were embarrassed about something or another, and if she wanted to pry, she was sure that the "what" was just below the surface, but she had a few guesses. Then there was the mental argument that appeared to be going on between the Professor and.... was that  _ Magneto? _

Disturbed, Jean drifted closer as other mental voices became clear. There was a distraught woman with Xavier, and closer than she'd anticipated was Kurt, who appeared to be panicking in German. 

She opened the window from the outside, stepped in, and... oh. 

Well that would explain why Kurt's voice had sounded so close. 

He and Pietro were crammed up against her wall beside the doorway, and Pietro looked like he was about three seconds from a heart attack he was so pale. He stumbled for a moment, juggling a giant leather-bound notebook, and shushed her. Before she could ignore him and ask what in the hell was going on, she sensed that the Professor was getting close. He had left Magneto and the hysterical woman further behind him, so as not to alarm her. 

At the forefront of his thoughts was Wanda. 

Her eyes shot back to Pietro and the desperate fear in his eyes and it clicked. Whatever it was that Wanda was caught up in had caught up to her, and now the Professor was going to involve her, for better or for worse.

She moved faster than she had thought was possible, guarding her mind and slipping the rest of the way inside of her room. When the Professor knocked, she had her hair tamed and a placid smile on her face. 

"Hello Professor," she said, desperately hoping she wouldn't hear her racing heart or the dozens of secrets she currently had confined to this room specifically. "How can I help you?" She winced internally. It sounded so stilted and forced to her ears, but he didn't seem suspicious, at least.

"I've heard through the grapevine that you're friends with Wanda Maximoff,"

"I mean," Jean hedged, "she's in one of my classes and she's friends with Tabitha." The Professor nodded, satisfied. 

"Nevertheless, have you seen her lately?"

"Not since Friday, no."

"Well," the Professor seemed disappointed, but not surprised. "thank you for your assistance, Jean," he sighed and rubbed at his temples. "And if you see him, please tell Kurt to stop singing that infernal song so loudly, and if he wanted to get it stuck in my head, he succeeded." Without waiting for her to respond, the Professor wheeled his chair around and started back down the hallway.

When Jean was sure he was far enough away not to notice, she shut the door and slumped against it, turning back to the interlopers in her bedroom.

Pietro took his hand away from Kurt's mouth.

"What song were you thinking?" He asked, sounding gleeful.

"Never gonna give you up," Kurt admitted sheepishly. 

"What are you two doing in here?" Jean demanded. The pair jumped, as if remembering for the first time that this was  _ her _ room.

"Looking for Wanda," Kurt said, at the same time that Pietro went with, "Hiding from my parents."

Kurt and Jean both turned to look at him in surprise.

"The woman out there was your mother?" Jean asked gently.

"According to what she told me about an hour ago, yes." Pietro looked uncomfortable. "And since she was with my dad, odds are pretty good that she wasn't lying."

"Why is everyone looking for Wanda?" Pietro gnawed on his lower lip.

"She lost control in the park," he admitted, "and she disappeared. Our mother seems to think it's got something to do with magic. All I know is that if Wanda did that kind of damage, she's got to be scared, wherever she is. And I have to find her before my dad does." He looked like he was going to be sick. 

"The professor's going to be going straight to Cerebro," Kurt said, his voice a hushed whisper. They'd never really dealt with a mutant who did so much damage so consistently. Jean wasn't sure what the Professor would decide the best course of action was to reclaim Wanda. 

Pietro looked devastated. 

Wanda was in danger.

"Kurt, you can fly the blackbird, right?" Kurt looked up at her, confused at the subject change.

" _ Ja _ ," he confirmed. "Could fly it with my eyes closed."

"Well," Jean said, steeling herself. She'd kept a lot of secrets, but it was rare that she did something to outright disobey the spirit of the Professor's rules. "They can't use it if we already have it."

"That won't stop them for long if they figure out where she is."

Jean felt her lips thin. 

"Just get us in the air, I'll handle the rest."

She wasn't sure, but she could almost swear that she felt the Phoenix hum in satisfaction as she sensed Jean's decision.

She took Kurt's hand and held the other out to Pietro. He tucked the notebook under one arm and grabbed onto both of them. Another blink and Kurt had taken them to the hangar. Guilt swelled inside of her, but she did her best to squash it.

What was a little teenage rebellion among friends?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen, it wouldn't be me without a Pietro POV. He's my favorite asshole, and also Wanda's brother, so he's important to this story.


	7. Chapter Six

Pietro knew that his nervous foot-tapping couldn't be helping the situation right now, what with Jean focusing so hard that she looked like she had a migrane the size of Kentucky and Bluebell trying to fly the jet solo for the first time, but he couldn't stop himself. 

He honestly didn't know what he was doing here. Like, sure, this was his sister that they were flying off to save, and he was the one with the weird spell book that for whatever reason only he could read, but this was not his bag. This wasn't even his useless-clutch-purse-that-people-insisted-were-practical. The other two did this shit. They were the heroes. Saving people from themselves was literally what they did on a weekly, if not daily, basis. All that  _ he _ was good for was cracking jokes at inappropriate moments and occasionally stealing something that ended up being valuable and important (See: Spellbook only he could read). 

But whatever he was or wasn't, he couldn't leave Wanda alone again. He'd let her down last time she'd needed him (sure, he'd been  _ seven _ , but when your dad is Magneto, you really should suck it up and stick together, he'd learned too late) and this time there was so much more at stake. He couldn't force Wanda to carry that alone. 

He busied himself looking over the book he'd stolen from his mother. Normally, when it came to reading, he was impatient. The books assigned in school were dull, and after a while the letters began to blur and mix themselves up. He knew he was dyslexic and that there were strategies in place to help him, but that didn't make it any less frustrating. So, he had a tendency to pick up a book, start in the middle and do his best to make it to the end. If he couldn't, he'd read the last few pages, and go with his best guess. 

This though... this was clearly something important to do with Wanda. And if his mother had really believed that Wanda was being possessed by something... well this was his best chance at figuring out what it was. Maybe even how to beat it. 

He pored over the book from the beginning, ignoring Jean when she eventually stood, fluid despite the turbulence that meant Ororo was probably trying to stop them, and walked to the cockpit to speak with Kurt. He kept waiting, anxious, for the moment that his dyslexia made the reading impossible, but the moment the words began to blur on the page, something would happen. The book would seem to shake itself and the letters would fall right back into place.

If only it were that simple all of the time. 

This made reading, for once, an almost enjoyable experience. If it weren't for the growing dread at the content and it's relation to his sister, he would dare say he actually liked reading when it wasn't impossible. 

As it was, the content  _ was  _ horrifying, and his dread  _ did _ grow with every passing page. 

It took almost half of the book, but eventually someone named the creature that was attempting to use his sister to eradicate life on earth. 

"Chthon," Jean said. Pietro's head snapped up, his heart sinking as he looked at her. Her voice didn't sound right, not really, and the way she was holding herself spoke volumes in a language he was certain Jean didn't know. "The more you read of that, the more of a danger you are to her, you know."

"What are you talking about?"

"Chthon grows in strength with the more people that know he exists. The more people who believe, the more people who know him, the stronger he is. If he manages to use your sister to enough effect that he can spread his name, he will devour the very core of this planet. It is a shame, I have grown quite fond of it here." Pietro recoiled at the passivity of her words.

"You say that like..."

"There is no chance of saving your sister." Jean said, bluntly. This was enough to convince Pietro that whatever was speaking right now was  _ not _ Jean. 

"Will the real Jean Grey please stand up," he said dryly before he unhooked his seatbelt, grabbed the book, and went to the cockpit to join Kurt in the co-captain's chair. "Something's up with Jean," he said without preamble. He rolled his eyes and strapped himself to the chair at Kurt's pointed look.

" _ Ja _ ," Kurt said, sounding disturbed, "I know. I think... whatever it is that she did to find Wanda may have opened her up to the same... thing that she says is possessing her."

"So you believe it, then? My sister isn't just off her rocker, and she's actually being manipulated by forces beyond the realm of mortal comprehension?"

"Pietro," Kurt said, blandly, clearly to get his attention before Pietro could go off on a rant. "I'm Catholic. The basis of our whole faith is that sometimes people go on supernatural benders and get visions. Besides," his eyes slid back over to Jean, "Whatever is going on with Jean has happened before. If it can happen to her it can happen to Wanda."

"This has happened before?"

"Last time Jean just ended up losing control of her abilities. Rogue had to step in, but she said that when she touched Jean, it was like there was something else trying to take hold. She said it was not evil, but it wasn't good, either."

Pietro looked back at Jean, discomfort seeping down to his bones, and saw that she was staring right back at them. 

He hunkered down in his seat and kept reading. Knowledge was power, and even if it gave Chthon more strength, it would give Pietro a better idea of what he was up against. That couldn't be all bad, could it?


	8. Chapter Seven

Wanda awoke to darkness and a metallic tang to the air. Immediately she went from half asleep to wide awake and terrified.

"No, no, no," the words began to choke her, and she fell silent, but the mantra continued in her mind,

_ No no no no no no _ .

She was back in the box. Maybe she had never truly left, but it had felt  _ so real _ . She'd gotten to breathe fresh air, gotten to make friends outside of the pages of books that she managed to smuggle from the hospital library. She tested her range of movement and found that she could use her arms, but that didn't mean much. They tended to only use the straitjacket to transfer her from room to room. 

"Lights?" She called weakly, resignation sinking in. Shapes were already beginning to coalesce in the dark space around her vision and she didn't want to wait for them to become something that terrified her. Keeping her in darkness had been considered inhumane to even the standards of the asylum, especially given the record of her hallucinations becoming worse when exposed to darkness for long periods of time, so the guards had wired in dim red lighting. All she ought to have to do is call out and ask for them to turn on the lights, and they would do it. But as the moments passed, Wanda began to wonder if they were feeling sadistic today.

There was a dripping noise somewhere to her left, and it was beginning to raise her hackles. Had the guards not turned off the faucet the last time they took a bathroom break?

She tried to take a few deep breaths through clenched teeth, wanting to filter out as much of the metallic tang as she could. It didn't work, but the mere effort made her feel better.

She sat up, thinking that moving closer might help the guards hear her so she could ask again for the lights. Her sleeve caught on something rough below her and she frowned. The surface of her box was meant to be entirely smooth. It was possible she'd caught her sleeve on one of the rivets, but that wasn't what it had felt like. 

Hesitantly, Wanda reached out and brushed her fingertips along the ground. Instead of the cool, smooth metal she had long since grown accustomed to in her solitary confinement, her hands were met with dirt and stone. She inhaled sharply as she realized that this decidedly wasn't her box. Which meant that the fuzzy static at the base of her skull was not the usual mutation-dampening sedative they gave her, but was just regular exhaustion. 

She summoned up her courage and reached out into the air in front of her. With a whispered plea she summoned up the blue glow of her magic and revealed the world around her. 

It didn't take much for Wanda to realize that she was in a cave. The rock face of the walls and the scattered stalactites that dripped down from the ceiling to meet their reflections in the lake below kind of gave it away. She could see where the cave branched off into a tunnel, which led into further crushing darkness. She shivered, fear pricking up the hairs on the back of her neck. She wasn't afraid of the dark, but the fear crawling on her shoulders felt an awful lot like someone was watching her. 

Against her better judgement, she turned and found herself staring into the blazing eyes that haunted her nightmares. The face they belonged to was still hidden in shadow, despite the magic that lit the rest of the room, but as she became acquainted with those eyes for the first time in her waking memory, she saw a glint of teeth as he smiled.

"Hello Wanda," he said, in a voice that Wanda almost recognized, "Welcome home."

Kurt swore as the fuel gauge began to blink at him and looked back at where he could see Jean lounging in one of the seats in the back. Beside him, Pietro stirred from where he had been engrossed in the blank pages of a book. Kurt knew enough of witchcraft to sense it when it came close to him. He'd befriended a witch, once, in the basement of the Church he lived and studied in. He'd never thought to ask what brought her to request sanctuary from the nuns, but if he didn't know better, he would say that Pietro now held the very same book she'd carried at her hip during her stay there.

"We need to land," Kurt said, pitching his voice low enough that he hoped he might not catch Jean's attention. Pietro followed his flickering gaze to the fuel lights that were pinging across the display of the Blackbird.

Apparently, his attempts to stay quiet and under Jean's radar went unnoticed. She walked up to him, silent as a mouse, and looked out of the window, then down at the dashboard.

He didn't recognize the look in her eyes, or the set of her shoulders, and he only just stopped himself from praying.

He knew enough of witches to know possession when he saw it, too.

"We will make it," She said, her voice solemn. "It will be fine, Kurt." Even his name sounded strange and unnatural when she said it, now. He knew better than to ask the questions he wanted answers to, but that did not stop his curiosity. "Continue to the coordinates."

Kurt gritted his teeth, his hackles raised, but he did as she asked.

He had a feeling that that was not entirely his decision. He flew the Blackbird long past what he would have considered dangerous, and eventually he felt the engine sputter and stop. In the blink of an eye he had a parachute in his lap and Pietro was clutching another in his arms, glaring daggers at the girl who was pretending to be Jean, but the jet didn't fall. It lurched, at first, then wobbled, and then steadied out with help from Kurt at the helm. Despite the nonexistence of fuel, the Blackbird kept flying. 

The next time there was a lurch, it was turbulence, but the time after, Jean's eyes snapped open. They were glowing with pride as she rushed up into the cockpit beside him, and she bared her teeth in a grin. 

Through the darkness, Kurt could see it too. There was a small village of scattered lights, and behind it, a mountain that blocked out the stars. 

"Take us down, Kurt. We're here." She said, and this time it was entirely Kurt's decision as he shifted his cramped fingers on the gears and as gently as he could manage with the fact that his plane was flying solely on the merit of a telekinetic, they landed. 

There was a chill to the air as they disembarked, but this was something that Kurt was used to, what with German and New York winters now both firmly under his belt. 

"Now what?" Pietro asked, staring up at the mountain face like it had personally offended him. 

Jean came back to stand beside them and scanned the ground around the base of the mountain. Without a word, she began walking toward the base of the mountain, and then she began to float upward. This was all well and good for her, as she could fly, and for Kurt, who could teleport if he slipped, but a huff of annoyance sounded beside Kurt and reminded him that Pietro had no such ability. Before Kurt could offer to teleport Pietro to the nearest landing, Pietro had shoved the spellbook into Kurt's hands and began to climb. 

Kurt shrugged and teleported to the spot he saw Jean aiming for. 

His eyes were well-equipped for seeing in the dark, but when he reached the landing and saw the entrance to the cave, he found that even his eyes couldn't make it through the full curtain of darkness inside. Pietro made it up a few moments later. Kurt almost asked how he'd managed to climb so quickly, but thought better of it.

Jean touched down beside them, her feet barely making a sound as she did so. The three of them stared silently into the cave.

"Not it," Pietro said, finally breaking the silence. Out of habit, Kurt echoed the words immediately,

"What?" Jean asked.

"I'm not going first. Not it," Pietro repeated. 

"Cowards," Jean scoffed, playfully, and for a moment Kurt thought they might just have her back. 

Which is, of course, when she lit herself on fire and walked into the cave. 

Pietro cried out and stumbled back, away from the flames licking up the sides of Jean's arms. Kurt, for his part, felt a twisting curl of dread at the sight of his friend enveloped in flames. They didn't appear to be hurting her, but he knew that if they got Jean back from this, it wouldn't be unscathed. With a frown, he followed Jean into the cave and ignored the look Pietro was giving him.

He didn't need anyone else to tell him how poorly this was going to go. 

They followed Jean like a pair of particularly daft moths following a will-o-the-wisp. For his part, Kurt lost all track of time. Every stretch of cave wall looked the same as the next, and as they made it deeper into the mountain he began to hear something dripping and the cave air grew damp. His mind conjured up images of a giant's mouth, waiting to crush them between teeth made of stone. He shuddered and willed his mind back to the problem at hand. 

He opened his mouth to ask Pietro what he was planning, and for the second time that day found Pietro's hand covering his mouth. He scowled before he realized Pietro was muttering something to himself.

"times eleven is seventy-seven, seven times twelve is eighty-four," Pietro met Kurt's eyes and shook his head, pausing only for a moment to catch his breath before he continued muttering the multiplication tables. 

Even without being a telepath, Kurt could take the hint.

_ Not now, not here _ .

He wasn't sure if it was Jean that had Pietro on edge, or if it was this place, but the end result was clear in his rigid posture and the way his eyes kept flitting around in the dark, waiting for someone to appear. Either way, the paranoia began to seep into his bones, too, and he let himself shift in his thoughts from English to German, hoping that if it were Jean he was afraid of, she wouldn't be able to translate his thoughts fast enough to act rashly. 


	9. Chapter Eight

#  Chapter Eight:

Wanda shrugged her shoulder bag off and tossed it across the cave, not caring where it landed. She heard it skid across the ground, but paid it no mind as she pulled herself into a seated position and buried her head between her knees. It was still dark, still *horrifyingly* dark, but now at least, she could tell herself it was because she was looking at her knees. She wrapped her arms around her head in an attempt to block out the voice that was still echoing through the cavern and did her best not to panic too much.

The man with the glowing eyes sighed. She wasn't sure if it was her imagination or not when she heard shifting beside her as whoever it was settled onto the ground next to her. 

"Go away," she whimpered. "You're not real, none of this is real."

"You don't really believe that."

"The doctors at the asylum  _ told _ me that I might have more hallucinations, that's all this is," Wanda said to herself. "My hallucinations can't hurt me, all you can do is scare me."

The man scoffed.

"And all of that would be true, were I a hallucination," he said, "a hallucination wouldn't hurt you," Wanda felt a grip on her arm tighter than any straitjacket they'd shoved her into. Wanda's head shot up at the contact and as she looked into his eyes, she saw for the first time, what he truly looked like. "but I have always been real, Wanda. I may not be able to maintain a physical manifestation beyond this mountain prison, but I can choose a vessel. And I guided you here to take what is rightfully mine." 

Wanda tried to scramble away from him, but his grip merely tightened on her, vicelike. In her desperation to keep ahold of herself, of reality, she found herself doing something she had never before considered doing. She channeled some of her brother's bravado.

"Sounds like something a hallucination would say," she declared, wishing beyond all reason, that she believed that this wasn't real. 

The man made a noise of disgust and placed both hands on her temples. Wanda could do nothing aside from tremble. She tried to move her arms, her legs, tried to call up her mutation, but she was frozen. Her legs gave way, and she heard more than felt herself hit the ground. Ice began to spread through her veins, starting at her temples where he had pressed his fingers. He wasn't there anymore and she'd heard enough scary stories to figure out what that meant. She was a puppet with cut strings, and he was the ghost who had possessed the untethered doll. 

When her eyes opened again, it was not at her request. When her hands moved to push herself into a seated position, it was not because her thoughts had told the muscles to operate. And she was filled with the knowledge of two things. One, that this was real, and two, his name was Chthon. And then came knowledge two, subsection a: Wanda knowing his name only made him stronger.

And when a girl wreathed in flames stepped into the cavern, lighting it with the unmatched power of the sun, it was not Wanda that recoiled in fear and disgust. 

It took her a moment to realize that the girl (who really should have been screaming in pain by now) was Jean. She noticed, though she wasn't sure that Chthon did, that she wasn't alone. Behind the flames, two shadows moved, and if she wasn't mistaken that was a very familiar sulfuric component that came straight from a hell dimension.

"Stay out of my way," Wanda heard her own voice say, vitriol dripping from every letter.

Jean did no such thing. Rather, she came closer and closer, until Wanda could feel the heat of the flames burning at the darkness, at her eyes, at the minuscule tether that held her to her body. Wanda stopped looking, she had to or she felt she might go crazy all over again. If it were possible for souls to slump to the ground, curl up in the fetal position, and cry for a bit, then that was what Wanda did. 

With a lurch, Wanda felt, truly  _ felt _ her knees ache as she hit the stone floor. Above her, she could still feel Chthon's presence. She wanted to scramble away, to run off into the cavernous darkness that Jean had emerged from, but she couldn't leave her friend behind. Jean was laying face down in the silt beside the cave lake, but much like Chthon, there was another version of  _ her _ standing there, still aflame, and that Jean shot forward toward Chthon. Wanda ducked but felt the hairs on the base of her neck curl and singe. She wasn't sure what had happened or why she had her body back, but she wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. She felt weak, but she gathered what remained of her strength and dragged herself forward along the rocks, through the dirt and the silt until she was able to collapse beside Jean in a half seated position. 

Every inch of her ached with a cold exhaustion. She could hear Chthon raging behind her, and the second "Jean" screeching some heavenly fury, but the cave echo blurred them together in a cacophonous roar. She ignored it. Wanda reached out to Jean, who looked to be in about the same state that she was. 

The smell of sulfur filled her nose again, and this time when she saw eyes gleaming in the dark, they were wary but kind. 

" _ Guten tag _ ," Kurt said, sounding as though he were barrelling past any questions he had, "take my hand, if you please."

Too tired to argue, Wanda obliged. Kurt lifted Jean into his other arm and before Wanda could so much as sneeze, she found herself surrounded by crisp, cool air. She shivered and slumped to the ground.

"Easy now," Kurt said, gently, "when you feel up to it, get Jean to the Blackbird. I have to go back and help Pietro,"

"Pietro's here?" She croaked, feeling panic well up inside of her. 

"He's here to help," Kurt reassured her, but her panic wasn't because of Pietro, it was  _ for _ Pietro. Like it or not, he was her brother. Whether they got along was not part of the equation, what mattered to her was that he was  _ here _ , and if Chthon was hell-bent on finding a vessel, what would stop him from just using her brother, instead?

"I have to go back," She found herself saying.

"Wanda,"

"I have to help, I have to--"

"Go back!" she finished, her voice lost amid the roaring noise that Chthon was making as he battled the other version of Jean. She reeled, dizzy, and stumbled back into the lake. The icy water came as a bit of a shock, and she knew that her socks were going to be soaked through, since the water came up over the edges of her boots, but it brought her back to the moment. It didn't matter how she'd gotten back, Kurt wasn't beside her, but what mattered was that she find her brother.

She looked past the flickering shadows and the light of the sun as they twisted and roiled, instead looking for a smaller shadow, one she knew moved fast enough that she might not be able to see. 

If luck was on her side, she couldn't say, but as light flashed through the cavern again, she caught a glint as the light reflected off of a familiar head of hair. 

She stumbled forward, ignoring the squelch in her shoes and the way that her knees shook with every step, and made her way toward where she had seen Pietro moving. There was a burning sensation near the top of her spine that grew more painful with every step, but she ignored it. 

"Pietro," she hissed as she got near enough to him that he might be able to hear. He was scraping something in the rock and sediment at their feet. When he heard her call him, he looked up and a myriad of emotions tumbled across his face. Sometimes she forgot that he experienced the world in a different way from everybody else, but then she'd see him go through the five stages of grief in the blink of an eye and she'd remember again. 

"What are you doing here?" he demanded, his voice settling somewhere between despair and anger on the grief scale. "Kurt was supposed to get you out."

"I'm spelunking," she shot back, matching his irritated tone. "I came back for you, dickhead!" she could feel her temper rising. "You have to get out of here, too," he cut her off, shaking his head before she had hardly begun the thought.

"Someone has to seal him here again, and  _ you _ are the one he's got marked as his vessel. The worst he can do to me is kill me, but if he gets out, we're all dead anyway."

"How... do you know all of this?"

"I took a crash course in Chthonic rituals on the plane ride over here," he drawled, but Wanda heard the truth in it. 

She dropped to her knees, allowing her legs to give out again at last. 

"What do you need me to do? And don't tell me to leave, I'll just come right back again." Pietro made a noise of irritation. 

"We need to finish the binding spell," Came a new voice from Wanda's other side. Pietro's face grew dark, angry.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded. Wanda turned and found herself looking into a familiar face. She'd dreamed of this woman countless times, found herself crying whenever she woke up and couldn't remember her name, or her face, whenever she realized that the woman wasn't there and never had been. 

If given three guesses, Wanda would say that this was their mother. The woman sighed.

"I understand that I am not someone you wish to see right now, but on the list of problems that we currently have, I do think this ranks fairly low on them."

The light sputtered, drawing Wanda's attention away from her mother,  _ her mother _ , and back toward Chthon, who had turned his blazing eyes on them all. 

"What's this?" he crooned, "three believers in one room? And four if you count the Phoenix! I haven't been so spoiled since the day the priests trapped me here," the delight in Chthon's voice made Wanda feel sick. 

"Hurry," their mother breathed, her voice laced with terror. She stood, reaching into her purse and pulled out a bottle stuffed with cloth and a lighter.

Pietro caught on, though Wanda did not. He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her up and away. Her body screamed in protest, her mind swam at the sudden shift in balance and the weight of her exhaustion, but she let him pull her along. 

Heat raced along her back, and Chthon howled. The room lit up again, this time only partially because of the Phoenix. Thanks to their mother, the cavern was also covered in half a dozen sputtering fires. 

"Fuck it," Pietro said, "that works better," he pointed across at the flaming debris. "We need to make that into a circle, I'll work on the runes."

"What runes? I can help," Pietro flipped open a book and showed her a blank page. 

"Can you?" He asked, and the sarcastic edge to his tone was undercut by the fact that he looked genuinely hopeful.

"It's... blank?" 

Pietro sighed.

"You got to be a vessel,  _ I  _ just get to be able to read a stupid book," he scoffed, "just focus on making the circle, if you finish before me, I'll figure something out."

Before Wanda could point out that she would happily trade places with him, he was gone in a rush of wind. The flames that were burning were sparse, it would take a lot more than just telekinesis to make that fire into a circle big enough to hold Chthon. She rushed up to meet her mother, who had been stumbling forward, her eyes not yet readjusted after watching the explosion. 

"Do you have any more of those?" her mother shook her head. 

"What about the lighter?"

"That I have," she replied, and rummaged through her bag to pull out three more. 

Wanda's coat was mostly dry after her stumble into the lake, and she gripped the sleeves first to tear it apart. It took both her and her mother, as well as Wanda's telekinesis to properly shred the coat, but in the end, she had enough dry strips of cloth dipped in lighter fluid that she had a feeling she could make the circle. It might not last long, and it might not burn bright, but it would do the job.

She hoped.

The Phoenix, who until now had been wholly engrossed in fighting Chthon, seemed to notice what they were doing, and as Wanda prepared to lay the last scrap of fabric, Phoenix launched herself backwards, kicking out at the still-wounded Chthon. He fell to the ground in the middle of the circle and Phoenix skidded back, outside of it. Before Chthon could take advantage of any guttering flames, the Phoenix reached out and placed a finger on the makeshift circle. The flames blazed to life anew and these, Wanda could tell, would last. 

Ringing silence fell across the cavern. 

Shaking, Wanda looked at Pietro across the circle, at her mother, who looked pale and frightened, and at Chthon, who was swirling, shocked and silent, in the circle, checking it for weaknesses. 

She didn't know if anyone was speaking. The ringing in her ears was loud enough to wake the dead.

She felt... lost. 

Seeing Chthon in that circle made her aware that for once, her mind was well and truly her own. She hadn't realized how many of his chaotic whispers had invaded her consciousness until they were gone. 

She was alone. Well and truly alone. 

It  _ terrified _ her. 

"What now?" she croaked out, past the trembling of her lips and the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. 

She hadn't really meant "what do we do with him now to complete the ritual?" but she was glad that Pietro took it that way. 

"To really trap him here, there has to be a sacrifice."

"What, like... a blood sacrifice?" Pietro shrugged. "Oh that's really helpful."

"Would  _ you  _ like to try reading the freaky magic book? Wait, that's right, you  _ can't, _ "

"Yeah, do you want to explain to me why  _ you're _ the only one,"

"--All it says is 'great sacrifice,' but why bother with details when it's something anyone should know,"

"I mean, I'm the vessel for fucks sake, I don't see why I can't read the book about the thing trying to eat my brain,"

They likely would have continued to talk over each other as Pietro flipped through the book again, looking for more specific instructions, had it not been for the short temper of the Phoenix. 

"Children!" she cried, her voice echoing in the silence of the cavern in a way that Chthon's never had. "Stop fighting!"

Pietro and Wanda looked at each other, momentarily confused, then back to the Phoenix. 

"That wasn't fighting," Pietro said.

"If you want us to fight, I could try to drop a house on his head, but..." Wanda trailed off, gesturing at the cave around them. 

The Phoenix stared at them, confusion radiated off of her in waves, but Pietro and Wanda offered no explanation. 

"Got it," Pietro declared, steamrolling over the awkwardness that always seemed to follow when other people tried to understand how it was that Pietro and Wanda ever got along without killing each other. "Someone has to step into the circle," Wanda shuddered at the thought, but as she looked over at where Chthon was throwing himself against the invisible borders holding him in place, trying to find fault or weakness in the runes that Pietro had carved into the stone, she felt an odd sense of... loss and longing. "and declare the sacrifice being made."

"So someone must give up their life in order for Chthon to truly be trapped," their mother said, solemnly. "Very well, I accept." Wanda felt alarm shoot through her at the thought of losing her mother, too, especially now when she would finally have a chance to know her. By the stricken look on Pietro's face, he felt the same. He reached out and caught her arm.

"Now hold on, we might be pissed at you, but that doesn't mean we want you to  _ die _ or anything," 

"Well I am certainly not going to allow either of my children--" 

Wanda tuned them out, feeling abruptly miserable again.

Her bones felt as though they wanted to melt into the stone, her head was throbbing with the beginnings of a migrane that would last for days, she knew, her throat and eyes were stinging with tears that she didn't know why she would possibly shed, and all she could see was Chthon, rage incarnate, swirling inside of a ring of fire. 

Shakily, she got to her feet and went to stand outside of the circle. She could feel the heat of the flames warming her legs. 

Chthon's mouth was forming words, but she couldn't hear them through the barrier. 

She didn't miss him, she decided. She was terrified to leave this cave and have it all be a dream or a hallucination, she had no idea what awaited her outside, but she would never allow him back inside of her mind. 

He was the reason that she had spent her formative years in an asylum, among books and orderlies and four thick metal walls. 

He was the reason she couldn't sleep at night. 

She gathered strength that she didn't know that she had and stepped into the ring of flames. 

_ "Wwwaaaannnddaaaaa..." _ his hissing voice filled her ears, the moment she broke through the barrier. Her stomach lurched and for a moment she thought she might be sick. It would be funny, she thought, to end up vomiting all over this entity of pure chaos, who had spent her whole life manipulating her thoughts, making her afraid, and molding her into the perfect vessel.

She was used to her anger being an explosive element, but for the first time, she realized that her volatile emotions had always been stoked by Chthon's influence whispering in her mind. Now, without him being part of her, intrinsically tied to her emotions, her anger was so much smaller, still enough to fill her whole being, but not enough to overwhelm her. Her anger was cold, and she held onto that chill as she looked into the embers of Chthon's eyes.

"I, Wanda Maximoff," she began, surprised at how steady her voice grew as she continued, "present a sacrifice to bind you to these stones." She recited, remembering what Pietro had read from the book. Chthon's laughter filled her ears, and she felt doubt fill her. Her hands shook, and she balled them into fists so he wouldn't see how scared she was. She didn't know if this would work, but she had to  _ try _ . She couldn't let her mother sacrifice herself, she couldn't let Pietro even  _ consider  _ it, and she knew Phoenix wouldn't. Jean, she was glad, was safe, if weakened and unconscious. Kurt as well, though she wasn't sure why he hadn't followed her back inside. 

That left her with one option. 

She wouldn't allow Chthon to take anything else from her. 

" _ Silly girl, sacrificing herself for a world that cares not, we could make it better, we could make it ours... _ " Wanda slapped her hands over her ears to block out his words. She wouldn't let him worm his way back into her doubts, back into her mind. She wouldn't let him take control of her again, if she had anything to say about it. 

"I sacrifice  _ you _ , Chthon," Wanda declared, not caring that this time, her voice did shake with every word. "I sacrifice your hold on me. I sacrifice..." Wanda blinked the tears from her eyes, refusing to shed even one over Chthon. "I sacrifice everything I know about myself. I sacrifice you to bind you to this mountain and trap you below the mortal plane. I do this so that no one,  _ no one, _ will ever have to hear your voice again."

Chthon's face was thunderous in his anger and Wanda felt herself go cold, a tingling sensation began at her fingers and spread through her body as she finished and fear settled over her. 

What if it didn't work?

What if it did?

The burn on the back of her neck seared again. Pain chased away the fear and returned the feeling to her bones. In the time it took for her to cry out in pain, grip the spot on her neck where the pain originated, and fold in on herself, Chthon was gone. 

She looked back at the others, their forms blurry from the tears in her eyes.

"Did it work?" she croaked, "is he gone?"

Before any of them could answer, or she could consider that they might not be able to hear her, the same way they hadn't been able to hear Chthon outside of the circle, her knees buckled and the world went dark. 


	10. Finale

#  Finale:

The second that Wanda goes down, Pietro was at her side. She was shaking, which meant she was alive, but she was running a fever that would put several deadly viruses to shame. The fire had gone out the moment that it no longer needed to bind Chthon, but the heat was still sizzling in the air around them. He had to get Wanda back outside, she probably needed a doctor of some description, he was already trying to figure out if the little village below the mountain would have a doctor good enough or if he’d have to find a way to run her all of the way to the nearest large city when he felt Wanda’s weight shift on his shoulders. He turned and saw that Magda had taken her other arm and mimicked Pietro’s position. She was a bit shorter than he was, already which ended up giving Wanda an awkward lean, but even he couldn’t deny that the help was appreciated. He didn’t know where the Phoenix had gone, and quite frankly, he didn’t care. She could be a problem for another day, or another universe for all he cared. Right now, his priority was Wanda.

They stumbled out of the cave system as the first pink glow of sunrise broke over the horizon. The first thing that Pietro saw was how beautiful the sunrise was over the little village.

The second thing he saw was his father, looking thunderous as he stood beside Xavier. Jean was sitting up again, which reminded him of all of the questions that he had about her Human Torch moment and the fact that the fire-her then  _ left her behind _ . It had been trippy as all hell to watch, but whatever it was that had happened had pulled Chthon from Wanda, too, so he supposed he ought to just be grateful. Jean and Kurt were arguing with the Professor and Magneto, and the answer as to why the hell Kurt hadn’t come back to get Wanda was revealed in the fact that Pietro’s father had a gloved hand clamped on his shoulder, simultaneously holding him in place and ensuring that if he tried to teleport, he’d have to take Magneto with him. The X-Men trusted Magneto about as far as an ant could spit, and Pietro was abruptly glad for that, since it had kept Magneto well away from the weird-ass situation in the cave.

Pietro wasn’t sure how, but he was certain his father would have found a way to fuck everyone but himself over and then have the audacity to tell Pietro to get him somewhere safe. 

“There you all are,” Xavier began, looking grim, pale and shaken. Jean stood, swayed dangerously, but nevertheless rushed toward them with fear in her eyes. When she reached them, she stretched her hand out to Wanda and Pietro reached out to catch her wrist with his free hand.

“Flame off,” he said pointedly. She blinked at him, her large green eyes distraught and confused before she seemed to put two and two together. She glanced back at Xavier and shook her head once.

_ She’s dormant, _ Jean said, projecting her thoughts directly into Pietro’s mind. _ The Professor saw to that. _

Pietro raised an eyebrow, suddenly full of follow-up questions, but he swallowed them and let her wrist go. 

_Your father doesn’t believe_ _that Wanda wasn’t in control_.

“Yeah,” Pietro muttered, “he never will.” His stomach was already churning with the thoughts of the threats his father would undoubtedly make. Jean reached for Wanda again hesitantly, and brushed her bangs from her eyes.  “Let’s get her back on the plane,” Pietro continued, his eyes flickering to the Blackbird and then to the jet that sported his father’s signature colors. Subtlety thy name is Maximoff. 

“Um,” Kurt spoke up, sounding sheepish where he was still being held back by Magnus, “we’re still out of fuel,”

“You will be coming back to the mansion with us,” Magneto said, voicing exactly what Pietro had hoped he wouldn’t. “And then I will be returning my daughter to the asylum where she--”

“ _ Fuck _ that,” Pietro blurted. Magnus was talking way too slowly. Magnus’s nostrils flared and Pietro felt himself tense, bracing for a blow that he was certain would come at some point. Sure enough, Magnus pushed away from Kurt and stalked over to Pietro. “I’m not letting you do that to her again.” Pietro continued. His voice wavered but he didn’t break eye contact. 

“It’s for her own good,”

“You didn’t see her when Raven got her out. What she  _ needs _ is to see a doctor on  _ her _ terms, that will listen to what she has to say over what you tell them to look for.”

If pressed, Pietro would say that he didn’t know where this was coming from, but that wasn’t true. He’d thought Wanda was going to sacrifice herself. He hadn’t realized she’d left them, he’d been too absorbed in arguing with their mother to think about watching his exhausted, bordering on broken sister. There had been a split second where he’d been certain she was dead and he wouldn’t be able to help her. He’d done a lot of things wrong by her, had been a truly shitty brother, but if he could stand up for her now and  _ maybe _ make her life a little better, he would. It was the cold, unadulterated terror that he was about to lose his sister for good that was now outweighing his fear of his father. 

Pietro saw a flash out of the corner of his eye and braced himself again, gripping Wanda more tightly.

“And by the way,” he continued, “we’re stealing your plane.”

Kurt gripped his arm and teleported back toward the jet. It took half a second for Pietro’s eyes to adjust, and another moment to realize his mother was still beside him, but Kurt needed no such thing.

“Can you even fly this thing?” Jean asked, pounding at the controls that would shut the door. Kurt scoffed, already in the pilot’s chair.

“I can fly anything.” He said, and started the engine.

Pietro ducked into the cockpit to see his father staring daggers straight at him. 

The best part of knowing how his father operated was that Pietro knew that this particular jet was made out of a polycarbonate plastic. Magneto knew that if he could bring down a plane with the power of metallokinesis, there was every possibility that someone else could as well. 

Pietro knew he was going to probably die in his sleep tonight for this, but running on adrenaline as he was, Pietro took it one step further, and flipped his father off.

“Uh, aren’t you forgetting someone?” he asked as he walked back to where the others were after taking in the Professor’s shocked and offended expression.

“He can  _ rot _ here,” Jean spat. Pietro had never heard Jean sound so angry. This Jean, he felt, was someone he could almost get along with. He craned his neck to see what Xavier and his father were doing, but they were out of sight by now. It intrigued him that Xavier hadn’t tried to stop them by controlling their thoughts or giving them some massive guilt trip. “Instead of letting her go,” Jean continued, “he trapped her back in my head and I can feel her stuck there, so no. He gets to stay here and think about what he’s done.”

He turned back to her, where she was helping his mother get a still-unconscious Wanda strapped into one of the six seats in the back row of the jet. He surveyed her expression and after a moment, gave her a small, sad smile and held out his fist.

“Welcome to the club, then,”

After a moment, she hesitantly leaned over and fist bumped him, as if unsure she was doing it properly. 

“What club is this?”

“The ‘my dad sucks’ club,” he replied. Jean didn’t bother reminding him that Xavier wasn’t her father. A glance into his mind would tell her what he really meant. A huffed sigh reminded him that his mother was there, and he felt his ears go a bit pink. He refused to back down, though. When he glanced at her, she was looking at him with a sadness in her eyes that struck Pietro to his core, not that he’d ever admit it. He swung around and strapped himself in the seat next to Wanda, leaving his mother no choice but to sit on his other side, as Jean had already claimed the other seat beside Wanda, and was already gripping her hand as if afraid she’d disappear again. 

“I think,” Pietro said, swallowing his instinct to tell her off or give her the cold shoulder. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

“It is a long story,” Magda hedged.

“It’s a long flight.” Pietro countered. “And this way, you’ll get to practice what you’re going to say to Wanda when she wakes back up.”

“Very well,” Magda said, and began to explain. 

It turned out that her explanation didn’t take as long as she had thought, and by the time Pietro had to speedrun learning how to fly a plane so he could take over for an exhausted Kurt, he had a lot to think about. 

She had left, she said, because she knew from nearly the beginning that Chthon was going to use Wanda to rise from his captivity. The birthmark on the back of her neck had been her first clue, and the more information she gained about Chthon, the more she realized that she was going to have to find a way to cure Wanda of his influence, but that her mere belief in Chthon was already having an inverse effect on Wanda’s well-being. When she had realized that Magnus would never believe her, she knew that she was on her own when it came to searching for a way to cleanse Wanda of his influence. Much though it had pained her to do so (not that Pietro was wholly convinced of that), she had left, searching far and wide for more information about Chthon, and anything that might save her daughter. Weeks turned into months and into years as she crossed continents alone, until she had run into a woman who claimed to be a witch, and who knew exactly the danger that Chthon posed to the world. 

Apparently, Agatha Harkness had, in their recent travels, discovered a way to potentially exorcise Chthon from Wanda, if he did not have enough of a hold on her for the separation to be lethal, but by that time, Magnus had moved them several times, and dumped Wanda in the asylum, allowing Chthon’s darkness to spread in her mind. Magda had followed Agatha here because she could see that Agatha had no hope for Wanda’s survival if the exorcism began.

In the end, her explanations didn’t matter. What she’d feared would happen had happened anyway, and worse. He’d almost lost Wanda  _ again _ , and she’d left them alone with Magnus, knowing he wouldn’t believe Wanda if things got worse. She couldn’t have predicted that he’d end up exiling Wanda or dumping him in an empty apartment to fend for himself while Magnus tried to build a colony on the moon, but she had followed the course of action she’d thought was best, and it had ended up hurting the ones she was so keen on protecting. 

Pietro tried not to read into it that she’d left  _ him _ behind as well, despite not needing to protect him, but she had offered no reasoning for that, and he didn’t want the answer badly enough to ask. The truth might just be bad enough to match what his imagination was coming up with, it might not, but the end result was the same: they were all crammed into a stolen hi-tech plane, on their way to a shitty city in New York, and he had no idea if Wanda would ever wake up again. 

By the time they were close enough to Bayville for him to feel justified in kicking Kurt awake for the landing, he was irritated, terrified, and exhausted to the point of it being painful. He could  _ feel _ the bags under his eyes, but he knew one thing for certain: he wasn’t going to sleep again for a while. 

The five of them stumbled out of the plane and onto the lawn of the Brotherhood house, illegal parking be damned. The sun was beating down on them and Pietro knew he needed about eight cups of coffee just to make it through the afternoon. Wanda, who still hadn’t woken up, but who  _ had _ occasionally begun to mumble in her sleep, which Pietro was taking as a good sign, was heavier than he remembered her being, but then again he was the only one carrying her, this time. His mother had looked heartbroken at his suggestion that she go check on Agatha, but when he’d mentioned that he’d let her know when Wanda woke up, had seemed satisfied. Jean was bleary-eyed, and if he hadn’t known that she was walking around with a cosmic, potentially  _ eldritch _ being stuck in the basement of her brain, he would have just thought she’d pulled an all-nighter. 

He approached the door of the house and kicked it, hard, a few times.

“One of us could have knocked,” Jean said, sounding half amused. 

“‘S was easier,” Pietro muttered through a yawn. Thundering footsteps sounded from the other side of the door, and Todd threw the door open. Pietro could see the others crowding on the stairs as they all tried to rush down at once, and Pietro figured Todd had cut his losses and just jumped the banister, as he was often wont to do. 

“The fuck have you been?” Tabitha called out as she shoved past the others and skidded to a stop at the door. Pietro took a deep, calming breath and ducked past everyone, careful not to hit Wanda’s head on anything. “Is she okay?”

“Far as we know,” he confirmed. “Look, it’s been a long day--”

“It’s been three days, asshole,” Lance said, coming to join them. “Kitty’s been freaking out because you kidnapped her best friend--”

“Not kidnapped, right here,” Kurt slurred, “my own volition and everything.”

“You still got that bat?” Pietro asked Todd, who was staring at Wanda and looking like he might offer to start a fight. Pietro’s quiet words broke him out of that plan. 

“Yeah, why?” 

“Dunno when she’s going to wake up, Kurt and Jean need a place to sleep, and I know how my father operates, so I’m guarding Wanda for the foreseeable future.” He craned his neck to look at Jean and Kurt, who were hovering awkwardly in the hallway, looking like they expected to be kicked out at any moment. He cocked his head toward the stairs. “Jean, Kurt you can sleep in Wanda’s room, if you don’t think you can get back to Xavier’s yet,” he offered, surprising himself with the words as much as he surprised them. 

He set Wanda down on his bed and went around the room, making sure that all of his usual measures were firmly in place. The window was locked and jammed, the dresser ready to be moved as a blockade in front of the door if necessary (he had a feeling that it might be necessary). When he was satisfied that the room could be completely secured from anyone trying to get in at a moment’s notice, whether it was a shadowy being from beyond the realm of human comprehension or their parents, Pietro ran downstairs to grab a chair from the kitchen. The other Brotherhood members had scattered at this point, and Pietro paused long enough to grab the baseball bat from Todd with a nod of thanks and poke his head in Wanda’s room to find that Kurt and Jean were already dead to the world. He shrugged it off, it was unlikely that they were in any danger anyway. He set the chair down and practically collapsed into it. The baseball bat sat ready on his knees, and Pietro waited. He needn’t have worried.

For the first time in living memory, Wanda’s sleep was dreamless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we have reached the end! Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it!

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on tumblr @scarletwix!


End file.
